Launching the Socialist Register 2016:

The Politics of the Right

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are at one of those historical moments that compel socialists to undertake a serious calibration of the political forces amassing on the right. This stems partly from the electoral breakthrough far-right parties have made in Europe as the global financial crisis and unrelenting austerity continue to take their toll. But not only in Europe. Across the globe the far right is on the move: the great strength of right-wing populism in the U.S. Republican Party and Conservative Party in Canada; the increasing range of state surveillance and intolerance of dissent, features of what some have called ‘post democracy’; the success of the BJP in India and the return of right-wing militarism to the political scene in East Asia; the strength of Putin’s populist authoritarianism in Russia; the continued spread of religious fundamentalisms to almost all quarters of the Middle East and many countries in Africa, and the response to this in the form of a new military dictatorship in Egypt; and the ever-increasing strength of the Zionist and religious right in Israel. The careful political mapping of the new right, undertaken by the 52nd volume of the Socialist Register, addresses pivotal questions in the reordering of the balance of political forces today.